I finished a big build session about an hour ago. The website looks beautiful. The connection between my Instagram page and my website is finally tight, and the wayfinding makes sense. And I am crying.
Why am I crying?
I’m exhausted.
If you’re a visionary building something big on your own, after the day job, after the family, squinting at your computer late at night because the idea won’t leave you alone, I think you already know this feeling. I’ve been calling this dysfunction ‘empire building’: taking on a project much bigger than I have any business carrying.
Tonight I want to look at the price of my audacity, because I don’t think I’m the only one paying it.
Here’s what happened.
Building alone: what one solo founder did in a week and a half
For the last week and a half I’ve been working on anavatau.com. The Anavatau Instagram account has been gaining attention and momentum in recent weeks, mostly because I decided to document my exploration of Samoa’s written history. It’s something I’ve been doing off and on for a couple of decades, but I never thought to document the details of it. That was because:
- I had no idea where to start this mammoth of a job.
- I had no idea how to approach it in a way that would capture anyone else’s interest.
Isn’t that the whole conundrum of making content? How do you take what interests you and make it digestible, and hopefully as interesting to other people? I figured some of that out, and as a result the Instagram page has gained over 10,000 followers in about three months, on the reach of only 12 or 13 of my most recent posts.
Then I realised I was collecting too much historical information to fit on the slides of my carousels, and I remembered that Anavatau started as a blog – why not use it for my overflow content? But when I went back to anavatau.com, other than the title and the logo, you could barely see a connection between the website and the Instagram page.
So after some research, my lovely brain devised a plan. A vision: Let’s make the Instagram and the website experience seamless for my audience. With a picture in mind now, I had no choice but to drop a few other priorities and embark on a new build.
By myself. As usual.
I’m the visionary, the architect, the researcher, the writer and the builder. Partly because I don’t know any other coders or software engineers who’d be interested in this kind of work. Also, by choice. It’s too hard to describe the vision in words for other humans to understand, is always the excuse. The tedious truth is also that I prefer it that way, even when it’s painful. (I feel guilty about that too, but that’s another post.)
So here’s what one person did in a week and a half.
I looked at how other well-made brands connect their Instagram to their website. I drew up my own mockup in Canva of what the new homepage needed to look like. I filled in blog posts on the website to match carousels I’d already posted, so people who follow the Instagram and go back to the website can find the corresponding blog post, with more detail than a carousel or caption can give them.
Then I realised the site had a big taxonomy issue. Its categories didn’t match the pillars on the Instagram account… so I overhauled the taxonomy.
I checked the mailing list I’d originally built for the website to see if it was robust enough to collect more signups. If people come to the website and like what they see, they might want to stay updated with news from Anavatau, so that list has to work. I found a bug that meant going into Google Console and redoing my GA4 analytics connections.
I signed up for ManyChat for the first time, so anyone who finds an Anavatau carousel on Instagram and wants the full story can just comment, and I’ll send them the link to the blog post. I want to do that for all of the Timeline Samoa posts.
Oh my gosh, I’m just realising it wasn’t only build work. I was also strategising content. I renamed my sequential history series to Timeline Samoa and created a new intro carousel for it, pivoting away from the reel format I’d used before.
Then I reorganised the UI (the user interface on the website) so it’s easier to navigate and the path from Instagram is more seamless.
No wonder I’m so tired. Almost none of that list is just typing. It’s deciding. Hundreds of small decisions, and every one of them came out of the same tank.
All of it culminated in today’s build session.
The website is not perfect. I don’t think it will ever be perfect. But compared to what I had two weeks ago, it feels like a year’s worth of really good work. It’s beautiful and it’s functional, and I’m so proud of it.
And I’m in tears.
Stocks and flows: a systems thinking look at entrepreneur burnout
I’ve been reading Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems (and listening to it on Audible as well). I’m nearly done. I’ve learned so much about the names for the parts of a system. I’ve worked in systems all my career, helping to develop, assess and evaluate them, but I never really understood the architecture of a system, at least not the way I do now.
Ever since I learned how to spot a system, I see them everywhere. When I have issues in my work life or my personal life, the first thing I do now is look for the system, deliberate or unintentional, that created the outcome. For this Anavatau work, the system I’ve been running for the last couple of weeks produced a great-looking website, a seamless connection between Instagram and the website, an exciting new direction for one of my content pillars, and a thoroughly (hopefully temporarily) shattered builder.
What went wrong?
Let’s talk stocks and flows. A stock is what a system holds; flows are what fill it and drain it. I came into this project two weeks ago with a stock of energy. My inflow of energy comes from:
- the way I eat
- how much sleep I get
- whether I take mental health breaks throughout the day
My outflow went into thinking, designing the UI, architecting the taxonomy, strategising the content, and sitting at a computer all day long, straining my eyes at a screen. And the outflow doesn’t stop at the project. Everything else in my schedule that needs my energy draws from the same stock.
Subconsciously, I knew I didn’t have the energy to sustain the work I was doing. Something was obviously lacking in my inflow. What was driving me was the vision.
I think this is the blessing and the curse of every visionary, every entrepreneur, every big dreamer: commitment to the vision feels energising in the moment. (I’m tearing up again realising this properly now but how about we not make this whole post about me crying.)
Here’s the shocker. When I finished the task in pursuit of that vision, it didn’t give me extra energy. It left me depleted.
So was the energy I felt an illusion?
I don’t think so. It was real, but it was borrowed. The vision wasn’t an inflow. It was a credit limit. It let me spend past what was actually in my stock, and the bill only arrived tonight, after the work stopped pulling me forward.
In systems terms, that’s a delay: the stock was draining the whole time, but I didn’t feel it until the work was done.
That borrowing helped me ignore other responsibilities in my life. Too many nights, it helped me ignore sleep, for hours at a time.
I look around my house at the chores that haven’t been done. If you’ve ever tried to run a household, you already know: chores that don’t get done don’t disappear. They compound. Looking at them, and the guilt that comes with them, is another drain on my stock.
Was my beautiful website worth it?
I only have the vision to lean on for that answer, and what sucks is that it’s speculative. Early indicators show potential, but nobody really knows until we see the return on the investment.
What my vision promises me is that this project will bring real value to the lives of Samoan people, especially those of us in the diaspora who have very little access to our culture and to the elders who traditionally pass our history down to us. I’m trying to provide a guide, access to the history of our people, and with it a sense of belonging to our culture and community. That’s the social impact of this work.
As an entrepreneur, I don’t need it to make a lot of money. I just need it to be sustainable. At the moment, as you can tell from my depleted energy, it isn’t. The vision tells me it will be, if I keep building the audience, show them the value of this work, and eventually offer higher-value products they’d be happy to purchase.
Last time: Is it worth it? All of it?
I don’t know. The only thing I do know is that I’ll never find out if I run my stock dry before I get there.
Can you build an empire without burning out?
Is it so bad to want to build an empire? I don’t think so. The empire isn’t the problem. The rate is. A forest isn’t destroyed by being big. It’s destroyed by being harvested faster than it grows back.
So here’s what I found tonight, for me and for every other visionary squinting at a screen after hours. Your energy is a stock. Sleep, food and rest fill it, and everything that needs you drains it, not just the project.
Your vision isn’t an inflow. It’s real and it will carry you, but it’s credit, and it will send you the bill. And the bill is delayed, so you’ll feel it after the work lands, not while you’re building.
For the sake of the vision, and for the sake of my own ability to achieve it, I need to prioritise my stock of energy. I need to eliminate anything I’m doing that inadvertently drains it. Not getting enough sleep is my big one; eating too much and not getting enough exercise are the others. Doing the opposite fills it back up. I also need to protect that stock, because I have other priorities in my life that need it too.
That means rewiring my vision just a little, with a guardrail: everything this beautiful vision is promising me is only worth it if I’m intact at the end of it to enjoy its success.
So, fellow empire builders: what’s in your stock tonight?
